Succeed with your collaborative app
To wrap up, your collaborative app is now becoming a full-fledged strategic product line, just as your core SaaS product for the web browser or native apps for Windows or mobile phones. To maximize success for your customers and ROI for your business, this section covers the initiatives and growth levers you must use. The following growth levers are pertinent at this stage:
What should you do during this final stage?
Wider TAM coverage across existing and prospect user base
Continue to increase the usage of your collaborative app on Teams through existing customer activation. You can continue new customer acquisition via the Teams marketplace or through sales-led customer deal wins leading with your collaborative app.
To plan and support the rollout of your Teams app in your customers’ organizations, follow the guidance, resources, and best practices available here.
Report and celebrate customer activation, deal wins and revenue
Share notable customer wins, customer success stories, and resulting revenue from user acquisition or deal wins attributed to your Teams app with the Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives. Microsoft can selectively drive executive visibility for your app and explore any possible GTM or marketing-drive acceleration for your app.
Convert PQLs from Teams app into active sales pipeline
A core product-led growth initiative is capturing Teams marketplace trials, trials sign-ups coming from your Teams app or freemium users into potential leads to be converted into paying customers. Remember to monitor the usage patterns, user retention, and product value experienced by the trial or freemium users. Use them to determine the customers that can be converted through sales, customer success, or direct product interventions (for example, upsell, upgrade prompts).
Deepen investment into Teams-app driven growth engine
This stage is ripe to further sales, customer success, and product-led initiatives to grow your SaaS business leading with the Teams collaborative app product line you’ve built. Consider making further investments into your sales, customer success, marketing and product teams who are responsible for the Teams app so that you can win more customer deals, collaborate with Microsoft on GTM and realize net new economic value through purchases and renewals on the commercial marketplace.
Continuously reduce churn via product and analytics-led insights
Retaining users by providing them with a sticky experience is key to growing your Teams app and realizing economic value from your product and GTM investments. Ensure that you’ve implemented robust and granular analytics for your Teams app. It should serve your need to measure when and which users have churned or are likely to churn from your app. You can them re-engage and retarget them via outreach channels within or outside your app.
Invest in richer and more impactful user scenarios
Innovation, grounded in customer needs, is the key to sustainably grow and succeed with your app on Teams.
Ensure that you monitor reviews for your app on the marketplace, user feedback coming from in-product surveys, and user behavior insights. You must also monitor app engagement analytics you’ve implemented in your app. Also, monitor customer inputs relayed by your Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives. It helps you to continue investing in new scenarios and enhanced user experience for your collaborative app.
Keep an eye on your competitors and other leading SaaS apps in your segment to continuously learn from the market and evolve your app’s strategy and roadmap. Since Teams marketplace is public, your product team can at the minimum use the Microsoft 365 developer sandbox to experience other apps.
Strategic developers, who are part of the invite-only Teams engineering’s build-with partner program, can get early access to new and latest cutting-edge collaborative features on Teams app platform. It's an opportunity for you to deliver unparalleled value to customers and use global GTM and marketing moments, being an early adopter to showcase new innovation on Teams. However you can always discover and use Microsoft Teams platform features that are in public developer preview.
Share feedback to enrich the Teams platform
Microsoft Teams app platform is ever-evolving with newer features that provide even more opportunities for developers like you to deliver unique, differentiated, and collaborative scenarios of value to your customers. Use your Microsoft field, account, engineering representatives to share feedback or product ask on Teams platform. You can also post product feature suggestions publicly here.
Share deeper app metrics and data-backed insights
Strategic developers, who are part of the invite-only Teams engineering’s build-with partner program, can share aggregate-level user engagement and behavioral insights with Microsoft PM and UX design team. This team can collaborate with you using their vast experience of working with app developers to share best practices of designing, developing, and growing apps on Teams. You can get expert guidance on feature enhancements, hypotheses-driven growth experimentation, and roadmap planning for your Teams collaborative app.
Where can Microsoft help?
Case Study on Microsoft’s public customers portal
Impactful case studies of how investing in a collaborative app resulted in growth for your SaaS business and how customers using your app got impacted can be published on the following customer-facing sites: Microsoft 365 ISV Benefits Program Success Stories and Customer Stories on Microsoft.com. Connect with your Teams engineering representatives or the ISV Marketplace Success Rewards Program team to check eligibility, seek guidance, and execute this motion.
Expand customer coactivation and joint new pitches
Microsoft evaluates coactivation opportunities in large customer accounts based on customer interest, adoption opportunity (sold seat size in customer account), and so on, among other criteria. Get in touch with your Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives to discuss potential joint customer pitches in large customer accounts.
Get included in Microsoft exec blog or flagship event endorsement
Get the power of the Microsoft executive team behind your next leadership blog or event. Review your plans for blogs or events in which you'll be participating. Develop ideas on how a Microsoft executive can help to promote your commercial marketplace offer in a blog or at an event. Reach out to the ISV Marketplace Success Rewards Program team to request Microsoft executive endorsement. If eligible, the team works with you to find a Microsoft executive (Director level or higher) to help endorse your Teams collaborative app available on the marketplace.
Share top customer feedback to shape app updates
Strategic developers, who are part of the invite-only Teams engineering’s build-with partner program, can learn from Microsoft PM and UX design team about incoming feedback from customers. You must specifically learn about your collaborative app or feedback at large about the segment your app belongs to. Such feedback is great input to plan customer-grounded future roadmap to enhance your app.
Early access to unreleased Teams Platform features
Microsoft-offered public Developer Preview for Teams is a public program for developers, which provides early access to unreleased features in Microsoft Teams. It allows you to explore and test upcoming features for potential inclusion in your Teams app and share feedback about the feature. While the program is open for all Teams developers, strategic developers, who are part of the invite-only Teams engineering’s build-with partner program, have a direct line to work together with Microsoft engineering to use these features in their apps.
Quarterly Business Reviews with ISV for app growth
Strategic developers, who are part of the invite-only Teams engineering’s build-with partner program, can benefit from a quarterly rhythm of business with participation from product, engineering, business development, and GTM leadership from Microsoft, and partner side. It helps to together take a stock of the app’s growth, resulting business outcomes and jointly agree on next wave of business impact milestones and partnership investments.
Each app in the Teams ecosystem undertakes this journey, in all likelihood, starting from a point solution to becoming a full-fledged collaborative app on Teams. Building, launching, gaining traction, achieving scale, and finally succeeding are phases that help you plan and execute your app’s go-to-market journey resulting in robust growth for your SaaS business on the commercial marketplace.
See also
Platform Docs